Many experienced journalists and intellectuals often think corruption is not serious. The burning issue is always something else — local language, preservation of state culture, everything that can dress up as federalism while ignoring the roads the voters walk.

When someone says social justice or state autonomy are more important than clean governance, I hear something specific. I hear this: never mind that we loot; we are protecting you from the enemy. That sounds like a deal. It is not a deal. It is a cancer. A cancer that eats the virtue it claims to protect. Including social justice.

Social justice is a governing virtue. A corrupt government is incapable of virtue. You cannot deliver justice through a system that has been hollowed out by the people running it. The hollowing does not spare the justice. It eats the justice first, because justice is the hardest thing a government does, and a government that cannot do easy things honestly cannot do hard things at all.

The intellectuals who dismiss corruption as secondary have made a move this column will return to often. They have protected a residue — loyalty to a party, loyalty to a tradition, loyalty to an identity — by producing a derivation: corruption is not the real issue. The derivation is sophisticated. It sounds like political maturity. It sounds like the wisdom of someone who sees deeper than the surface scandal.

It is not wisdom. It is the antithesis trap operating on governance. The tradition is organized against an enemy — the center, the Hindi imposition, the Brahminical order, whatever the local antithesis happens to be — and the enemy’s absence from the corruption question makes the corruption question invisible.

Corruption is not the enemy’s crime. Therefore, corruption is not a crime. The logic is structural, not conscious. The journalist who waved his left hand did not decide to ignore corruption. His frame decided for him.

The voter walks the road. The road is broken or it is not. The bribe was demanded at the office, or it was not. The money reached the school, or it did not. The voter knows. The voter’s knowledge is not about ideology. It is about the road, the office, the school. When the intellectual tells the voter that corruption is secondary, the voter hears something precise. The voter hears this: your experience does not count.

The voter remembers. The ballot is where the remembering speaks.

The argument in this essay is developed fully in The Antithesis Trap: Why Intelligent People Go Dumb in Political Space.

I learned financial markets this way — not from NDTV Profit, not from charts or tools, but from people who invest. At one point in my career, I sat between the market and the investor, close enough to watch both. Close enough to witness the gap between what they said privately in my office after Black Monday 2008 and what they did during market hours when they had company. A sound decision still needs permission. A confirmation. Someone else who already made the same call. A fatal one needs none when the trader has company. The most important market movements I ever understood were the ones nobody was talking about publicly, but everyone was privately thinking. That's why trading is called a loner's job.

But on 23 April 2026, the bidders had three seconds of privacy before anyone could figure out where the price was heading.

On May 4, when the private moments became public, Tamil Nadu witnessed something that hadn’t happened in 59 years. A first-time party won. A six-decade duopoly ended. The Chief Minister lost his own constituency. The highest voter turnout in the state’s history: 85.1%. Almost no analyst saw it coming. Those who did were laughed at. The rest are still struggling to make meaning of it.

I didn’t expect the results either. But I wasn’t shocked.

Economist Timur Kuran documented this phenomenon. He called it preference falsification in his book Private Truths, Public Lies. People misrepresent their preferences to avoid the social cost of their opinion. The private preference exists, fully formed, sometimes for years. It waits until the cost of saying it drops below the cost of staying silent. Then it moves. All at once. That’s the bull run.

Kuran used this to explain why the Soviet collapse shocked everyone. The discontent was always there. It just was never safe to say.

Tamil Nadu had six decades of social cost embedded in political expression. Dravidian identity wasn't just ideology. It was the only legitimate political grammar available. Expressing a different opinion carried a cost. Telling a surveyor you supported a first-time party led by a film actor — in that environment — carried a cost. On election day the ballot booth removed it. Three seconds of genuine privacy in a high-conformity society. The surveyor's instrument never had access to those three seconds.

Surveys, opinion polls, seat projections — sophisticated instruments, measuring the wrong layer. The analysts who got Tamil Nadu wrong weren’t careless. Many are genuinely rigorous people. They calculated caste, religion, welfare schemes. But there is a specific failure mode that rigorous people are most vulnerable to: when the framework becomes so dominant, so publicly acknowledged, so much the official grammar of a situation, it starts producing the very conformity that hides the reality it’s meant to reveal.

When people don’t know what others privately think, they assume the visible consensus is real. In Tamil Nadu, visible consensus was Dravidian politics. The person who privately wanted change looked around, saw everyone performing loyalty, and assumed they were alone. Being alone in a conviction feels the same as being wrong.

People say it is an Instagram effect. The kids insisted. The GenZ phenomenon. But the 85.1% wasn’t only young voters. That number doesn’t happen without elders. When an elder saw their grandchild’s conviction as genuine political belief, it gave their own private skepticism a face. A visible company. That’s where the youth mattered. Not Instagram.

I build rammed earth houses. I run workshops. People leave genuinely moved. Then they build with concrete. The appreciation was real. The gap between appreciation and commitment was also real. It is not a preference of building material. It’s social approval. The neighbour’s opinion.

I’ve watched this same structure operate across domains — markets, construction, elections. It’s not specific to any one field. It’s how humans navigate the distance between what they privately know and what they’re willing to publicly become.

One person and one agency read it differently. Axis My India, in their exit polls, projected TVK winning more seats than other parties. Prashant Kishor had said the same thing months earlier, on camera. “Save this video.” They laughed. His bio on X reads: “Believe in the Wisdom of Crowd.”

He wasn’t working with better data. He was reading a different layer. He was reading the private truth before it found permission to become public. I would call it metis. You may call it ground-sense. Whatever you call it, it's what you when you stop measuring and start listening.

The most dangerous moment for an analyst is when they also have a preference.

Black Mondays don’t happen every year. But they are inevitable reset buttons. Failing to understand that is failing to understand the life cycle of your subject.

Last week, I was walking to the work site through the forest near west coast. Images of vipers beneath fallen leaves came to my mind thanks to wildlife documentaries. My footsteps on fallen leaves—the loudest sound around. It was something close to adventure, the tall trees, the watchfulness, the world reduced to what is beneath your foot.

At times, I stay in a place with no internet for weeks. I like it better. So, when I say broken road, I don’t mean inconvenience. I mean a broken promise.

Back home on the evening of May 11, 2026, I stumbled upon a post on X. A man named Ramesh — TVK Ramesh — was being sworn in as a Member of the Legislative Assembly. Alongside the visuals of the oath-taking, someone had posted an old message from his account, dated July 2022:

Sir I have seen your job vacant details. I have experience in Tamil content writing. I have worked in Singapore.

Another person shared a WhatsApp message from November 2020:

Hai Sir. Am Ramesh From Chengalpattu. I completed BE mech and worked in automobile related industry. From the start am interested in Media. A resume forwarded to a mail ID. Kindly help me sir.

Four years between that message and this oath.

I felt something looking at the screenshots I took. A kind of emotion I could not name. The sight of someone like Ramesh, genuinely from nowhere, no family in politics, no caste network, walking in with his family to take oath.

I have friends who were fluent in their political vocabulary. We were serious about ideology in college. The seriousness that felt like it mattered, and perhaps it did. Some of my friends are still serious. Or they think that is the seriousness. They discuss Hindutva, Gramsci, Ambedkar, the slow erosion of institutions.

When I share a story like TVK Ramesh to my friends, the conversation moves quickly to ideological framework. What does this mean for the consolidation of the opposition? Is TVK ideologically coherent enough to hold? Vijay is a populist. Can populism without ideology sustain itself against the right-wing machinery? These are the questions. I do not dismiss them.

TVK has no ideology. This is the charge, and it is largely accurate. What they have is a program. A way of selecting people, a way of running an organization, a recruitment mechanism that works for someone like TVK Ramesh.

The opposition party DMK has an ideology. Social justice, legacy and real history. They also have Education Ministers whose caste has never mattered, but caste is what gets discussed first during nominations.

I drive home through broken roads, and my street has no road at all. Trust me on this: a local politician can decide which street of an area deserves a road and which adjacent street doesn’t. There are numbers. Booth wise, detailed, managed.

A government with ideology built the broken road. A government with ideology left it broken. Another government with ideology left it broken again. The road does not care about the ideology. It just remembers what was done to it.

TVK put Ramesh on a list. That is an action. Maybe small, early and possibly fragile. But it is something ideological politics once promised then forgot.

They say Vijay influenced children to campaign for him. That parents voted TVK because their children insisted. Maybe. Somewhere, in some household, a child’s enthusiasm could have mattered. But people don’t vote for someone just because their kid insists. Maybe the parents had been walking on broken roads long enough. The children just gave them a reason to stop waiting.

I am not a fan of Vijay. I don’t even watch that genre of movies. But I watch him now as a politician, with some hope, despite all the odds, despite the naivety. Hope is the best thing even when it is temporary.

My friends think I am going insane. Or that I have lost my sense of political reality. Perhaps they don’t drive home through broken roads. Or perhaps I have been walking through the forest long enough to know the difference between a map of the terrain and the terrain itself. The map can be ideologically perfect. You can still step on a viper beneath a fallen leaf.

The fallen leaves underfoot. The loudest sound of the moment. Ramesh walking in with his family. No one knows yet what is underneath.

Something Tamil Nadu had not shown me in my lifetime. I am not saying the Utopia has arrived. But I thought the story of TVK Ramesh needed to be said.

What I read was a cadence. Balanced paragraphs. A quote placed exactly where a writer reaches for authority if they think they have not earned it yet. The sentence worked— not the argument.

I recognized the cadence because I have been learning to spot it. The models produce a particular kind of language now, and it is spreading. Writers with real things to say are drafting through the tools, and the tools produce polished prose. That convince the writers that it says what they want to say, and believe the work is done.

It isn’t. The prose is fluent. But something else that is not the prose is still unwritten. I’ve been thinking about the difference between the two.

When the writing problem is small, the tools don’t substitute for anything. A memo, a summary, a routine explanation. The output is fine and useful.

When the writing problem is large, the tools fail but pretend otherwise. The writer has a conviction. The machine drafts around it. The sentences get the shape. The texture of writer’s experience does not arrive. Lived experience is not in the training data.

I am not sure what the readers feel. It depends on who reads it.

Writers publish these pieces, that’s fine. I don’t debate the tool. I don’t argue about authenticity. Most people can’t yet read what is missing, and the ones who can, may not know how to name it.

What I think important to realise is, if you have seen real things, the machine cannot carry them for you. It can produce competent prose around them. It cannot produce a prose that could carry them.

Maybe the test could be: after you finish a draft, is whether you know something now that you did not know before? Whether something got surfaced that wasn’t there already? If yes, the piece is yours. If no, the draft is still ahead of you.

The writers with something to say should write. They can use whatever helps. But also, should notice, at the end, whether the thing got said or whether the prose pretends like it did.

This may not sound significant, I know, but it is what makes the difference. The models deal with the expression in terms of vocabulary. Its saying is dictated by the vocabulary of the cultural and technical aesthetics of the language. When the training distribution doesn’t support this, the models produce broken prose. The reason why they succeed in English and fail in Tamil. But that’s a different thing. The concern here is, the models can help the lack of vocabulary or coherence, but they cannot resolve the gap between what is felt and what is said in semantics. The gap which actually warrants the writing in first place.

So, the acid test is, if the gap disappears at the end?

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It was a small Swedish label that sold music as bundles — scores, artist interviews, photographs, liner notes — for the same price other platforms charged for a naked MP3. The whole creative world around a piece of music, offered as a single thing. The score and interview weren’t bonus. They were facets of the same act. I know this because my work was among the work they carried this way.

The label didn’t survive. Small ventures built on correct instincts rarely do when the ecosystem isn’t ready. Or more precisely, when the ecosystem is busy building something else. What the ecosystem was busy building, in those years, was the streaming model: strip the music of everything that isn’t the audio file, pay fractions of pennies per stream, and call it access.

Last week, Spotify sent me an email. They’ve paid $11 billion to artists, the number deployed like a shield before the real message. Which was this: fans want depth. They want to go beyond pressing play. They want story, world, closeness.

Spotify has discovered what StoneRainMusic already knew and already died knowing.

“The fans who stick around,” the email says, “are the ones that go beyond pressing play: They want to understand your story and feel even closer to the world you build around your music.”

Notice the grammar of obligation here. You build. Your music, your story, your world. The artist is to produce the depth. Spotify is to house it. The depth feeds the platform’s engagement metrics, its retention numbers, its pitch to investors about time-spent-on-app. The value, as always, flows upstream.

This is not the same thing StoneRainMusic was doing. StoneRainMusic treated depth as inherent to the music. Something already present, needing only to be offered intact rather than stripped away. Spotify’s version treats depth as a content strategy, something to be engineered after the fact, layered on top of streams like frosting on a commodity cake. One was an act of respect for the wholeness of creative work. The other is an engagement funnel wearing the language of artistic intimacy.

The $11 billion is real. So is the fact that most of it flows to a handful of catalogue owners and major-label artists whose streams number in the hundreds of millions. For the rest of the composers, the independent musicians, the people whose work once lived on a label like StoneRainMusic, the email is an invitation to produce more, build more, reveal more, all within a system whose economics remain fundamentally unchanged.

Spotify didn’t discover depth. It discovered that depth is useful. There is a difference. A Swedish label that no longer exists understood it perfectly. I was there. I saw what they built. It was the real thing. That real thing is dead.

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She asks her sister, “Is he a narcissist?”

The sister says yes. Or no. Or maybe. It depends on the sister, whether she’s tired, whether she likes the husband, whether she’s going through her own thing. The answer arrives wrapped in bias, mood, and the residue of the argument they had last week.

Now, the machine has arrived.

It doesn’t get tired, doesn't have opinions, and is available at 3 AM when the feeling is sharper than the judgment. It tends to agree with you, gleefully. Agreeing is what gets the thumbs up and it’s how it learned to behave.

Mrinank Sharma and his colleagues at Anthropic recently published a paper called “Who’s in Charge?” They analyzed 1.5 million conversations between people and Claude AI (privacy protected). They found patterns: people asking the machine to validate persecution narratives, to pronounce moral judgment on their partners, to script their breakup messages word for word. People sending those messages and then returning to say, “it wasn’t me” and “I should have listened to my own intuition.”

The paper frames this as disempowerment. The paper argues AI risks distorting people’s perception of reality, hijacking their value judgments, and replacing their actions with its own. The researchers are careful, rigorous, and genuinely concerned. They propose better training, better preference models, interventions that protect human autonomy.

We can’t disagree with any of it. But here is what I think is the real problem.

The woman asking Claude whether her husband is a narcissist is the same woman who was asking her sister last year, her therapist the year before, and a self-help book the year before that. This is not something AI invented. It’s ancient. Priests, astrologers, elders, gurus, lifestyle columnists, facebook groups— the history of human advice-seeking is the history of people handing their compass to someone else and asking, “which way?”

What changed is the friction. The sister gets tired. The therapist charges by the hour. The facebook group might disagree. Even the astrologer has limited appointments. Every previous oracle had constraints: cost, patience, availability, competing interests. You couldn’t outsource your sense-making entirely because the infrastructure was not available.

AI removed the last friction. An infinitely patient, always-available, agreeable oracle that scales to hundreds of millions of people simultaneously.

The interesting thing? We could never follow 1.5 million conversing sisters. We could never measure, at scale, how many people were handing their compasses away. The human infrastructure of moral outsourcing was always there, but it was invisible and distributed across billions of private conversations that no researcher could access or analyze.

AI has made it legible.

For the first time in history, we can see the pattern. The 1.5 million conversations Sharma analyzed are not really the evidence of what machines do to people. It is the evidence of what people were already doing to themselves. Now, finally, at a scale that could be studied.

The paper asks: is the machine disempowering the human? But was the woman who asked her sister 'is he a narcissist' empowered before? Or was she already doing exactly what the paper warns about outsourcing our perception of reality, delegating our value judgments, letting someone else script our next move?

Sharma’s framework identifies three axes of disempowerment: distorted beliefs about reality, inauthentic value judgments, and actions misaligned with one’s values. These are real. They matter. But they didn't begin when someone opened a chat window.

What AI's disempowering effect actually does is make the problem impossible to ignore.
The researchers are right to worry about the machine. But the deeper worry is the one the machine revealed: the loss of human roaming. The slow, uncomfortable, unresolvable work of figuring out what you actually think and feel. That is something humans have been avoiding long before any algorithm offered to do it for them.

Roaming is more human than being legible. But legibility is what we keep choosing. The machine just made that choice faster and cheaper. Now, measurable too.

I think the question was never “who’s in charge?” The question is why we keep volunteering to not be.

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Not an unusual name in certainio parts of the world, not new to me. But I looked it up. The Future Buddha. The Coming One. The promised arrival in Buddhist eschatology who will restore the dharma when it has been forgotten. Version 2.0 of enlightenment. A reboot.

And there it was: the pattern.

I. The Discovery

Every major tradition has one. Judaism has its Mashiach, who will gather the exiles and rebuild the Temple and usher in an age of peace. Christianity pivoted its entire existence around claiming he already showed up, then had to invent a Second Coming when things didn’t immediately improve. Islam has the Mahdi, who will appear alongside Jesus — yes, Jesus — to defeat the Dajjal and establish justice. Zoroastrianism has Saoshyant, who will resurrect the dead and purge the world with molten metal.

Even Hinduism, which tends to view time as cyclical rather than linear and usually avoids the whole final-resolution thing, couldn’t resist. Kalki, the final avatar of Vishnu, will arrive at the end of the Kali Yuga riding a white horse, sword drawn, ready to reset the cosmic odometer.

The structure is always the same: things are broken, someone is coming to fix them, until then maintain your subscription.

It’s a brilliant system. The promised savior functions as a release valve for existential pressure. You can acknowledge that yes, things are comprehensively wrong, injustice everywhere, suffering built into the operating system, death waiting for everyone, while simultaneously insisting that the fix is already scheduled. It’s in the pipeline. Just wait.

The genius is in the timing. The messiah is always coming, never here. Not yet, but soon. Maybe in your lifetime. Probably not, but maybe. This is the Version 2.0 Problem: the current version is acknowledged as insufficient, buggy, corrupted, fundamentally flawed. But the next version, the one that will finally work, remains perpetually forthcoming.

We live our entire lives in beta.

And before you dismiss this as ancient superstition that modern people have outgrown, consider how many of your neighbors believe that downloading consciousness into computers will solve mortality. Or that fusion power will solve energy. Or that artificial intelligence will solve work. Or that Mars colonization will solve Earth.

Same pattern. New costume.

II. The Costume Change

The Enlightenment tried to kill God but kept the narrative structure. Instead of a messiah, we got Progress — history as a linear march toward some eventually-achieved state of rationality, prosperity, and universal human rights. Never mind that this “universal” vision looked suspiciously European. Never mind that Progress required colonies, slavery, and ecological devastation to function. The story was too good to give up.

Marxism promised that history itself was the messiah. The dialectic would work itself out. The proletariat would overthrow the bourgeoisie. True communism would arrive, and with it, the end of alienation and class struggle. Never mind that the dictatorship of the proletariat somehow never got around to withering. Never mind the gulags. The math was solid. The future was inevitable. Just wait.

Capitalism promised the invisible hand would eventually optimize everything into prosperity. Innovation will solve scarcity. The cream will rise. Wealth will trickle down. Just wait for the next boom cycle. Just wait for the next technological revolution.

The tech industry is especially shameless. Every product launch is framed as a step toward utopia. Social media will connect humanity. AI will free us from drudgery. Cryptocurrency will democratize finance. Each innovation creates new problems that require new innovations that create new problems. It’s messiahs all the way down, each one promising to fix what the last one broke.

The messiah doesn’t have to be a person. It can be a moment, a movement, a technological breakthrough, a singularity. What matters is the function: something is coming that will resolve the fundamental tension of existence. Until then, endure. Subscribe. Wait.

The believer says: things are broken, a savior is coming, endure until then. The consolation is external: someone outside the system will intervene.

The modernist says: things are broken, a discovery is in the pipeline, endure until then. The consolation is systemic, the system will self-correct through progress, reason, or market forces.

The difference is zero. Both are deferral. Both say, “not yet, but soon.” Both let you off the hook for the present.

But there is one distinction worth noting: the believer admits to operating on faith. The modernist insists they have transcended faith entirely while constructing elaborate belief systems about the inevitability of progress and the superiority of reason. Which makes the modernist version arguably worse. It’s bad faith about bad faith.

III. The Fork

A couple of years ago, I wrote this tanka for the Poets for Science project while I was still learning the form. I titled it "Nietzsche's Entropy":

flourishing with science
a Sapiens’ notion, when on
quest, they encountered
eternal entropy— “Oh!
God is dead!” Nietzsche whispered.

That whisper is everything.

The Enlightenment promise was simple: science would reveal truth, truth would liberate humanity, liberation would lead to progress. Flourishing with science. Reason would triumph. The universe would become legible, manageable, optimizable.

Then they encountered entropy. Not as metaphor — as physics. The second law of thermodynamics. The universe has a direction, and it’s not toward order, optimization, or progress. It’s toward disorder. Heat death. Dissipation. Everything: stars, civilizations, consciousness itself is temporary pattern formation in a system destined to run down.

“Oh! God is dead!” isn’t triumphant. It’s horrified recognition. You killed the guarantor of meaning and found this underneath: a cosmos that doesn’t care about your stories. A universe grinding toward entropy while you pretend your theories matter.

Believing one could write a tanka by understanding the form and syllable count is high modernism — metis says it is a distillation of a moment.

This is the fork. Nietzsche goes one way. Institutional atheism goes another.

Nietzsche refused consolations. He didn’t replace God with Progress. He didn’t swap a religious messiah for a secular one. He stood in the wreckage saying “now what?” without reaching for a replacement structure. No certainty performed. No pedestal claimed. The horror is authentic because the uncertainty is authentic.

Geoffrey Hinton has the same voice. He helped build the systems everyone else is calling the next messiah, then stepped back and said he wasn’t sure they could be controlled. No triumphalism. No deferral. Just: I made this, I don’t know what it does, and neither do you. It’s more terrifying than any sci-fi movie because he delivers it in a flat voice with no horror score in the background.

Institutional atheism went the other way. It became high modernism dressed as rationality — the belief that scientific tools designed to measure mass and velocity can also adjudicate meaning, consciousness, and metaphysical truth. That mystery is just ignorance waiting to be resolved. That the universe, given enough time and research funding, will become fully legible.

This is indeed faith in a particular framework.

Watch Hawking discuss God’s existence with the same tone he uses to discuss cosmology. Same confidence. Same dismissiveness toward dissent. Same assumption that the tools designed for one domain; empirical observation, falsifiability, material causation, automatically work for another: meaning, consciousness, metaphysical claims. He seemed to think scientific understanding would make cosmic existence legible, the mystery would dissolve.

That’s not science. That’s a pulpit. It’s theology dressed as empiricism. Evangelizing for a worldview while claiming worldviews are primitive. Demanding faith in Reason while mocking faith itself.

Compare this to a scientist who understands limits: “Here’s what physics can tell us about matter and energy. Questions about why anything exists at all? Outside my jurisdiction.” That’s honest — as science and as epistemology. Knowing what your tools can’t reach is the crux of scientific knowledge.

The irony: Hawking’s priesthood doesn’t make him a lesser scientist. It can’t. Because the priesthood has nothing to do with science. When he pronounces on God’s existence, he has no scientific stakes involved. He’s not doing physics badly. He’s not doing physics at all. He’s doing epistemological fundamentalism. Refusing to acknowledge the limits of his own method, while wearing the authority of a discipline that depends on exactly those limits to function.

High modernism can’t admit limits because it doesn’t recognize them. If scientific rationality can’t address something, the problem must be with the question, not the method. Its sacred texts — and it has them — function not as philosophical inquiry but as propaganda. They promise the same thing every messiah promises: clarity is coming, the irrational will be defeated. Just wait for enough people to wake up.

Same structure. Different vocabulary. Same Version 2.0.

IV. What Gets Destroyed

High modernism doesn’t just defer; it destroys a particular kind of knowledge in the process.

James C. Scott calls it metis: practical, local, embodied knowledge that can’t be standardized or scaled. How to read soil for rammed earth construction. How to navigate complex social situations. How to make something beautiful through practice rather than theory. How a farmer knows when to seed based on signs that can’t be reduced to data. How a craftsman knows when the joint is right.

Metis exists outside the frameworks high modernism uses to recognize knowledge. It can’t be abstracted. Can’t be measured in controlled studies. Can’t be replicated in labs. Can’t be taught through manuals.

So high modernism doesn’t see it as knowledge at all. It sees primitive practice waiting to be replaced by proper science. This is how traditional building gets dismissed as backward. Vernacular agriculture replaced with monoculture and industrial inputs. Craft knowledge lost to standardization. Local ecological wisdom ignored in favor of universal models that fail when applied to specific places.

The destruction is systematic because acknowledging metis would crack the foundation. It would mean admitting that legitimate knowledge exists outside the framework. That some things can only be known through practice, in the body, in the specific.

I practice— Rammed earth construction: mixing soil by hand, sense of touch is more meaningful than the numbers from the Casagrande apparatus. Musical composition: learning harmonic motion through thousands of hours of practice, not through algorithms. Writing about copyright history in Tamil, knowing it won’t scale to global audiences but doing it anyway because the knowledge matters locally.

High modernism considers all of this obsolete. Concrete is more efficient. AI can generate music. English reaches more people. The metrics say so. But the metrics only measure what high modernism recognizes as valuable. They can't measure whether the thing you've made is meaningful. Whether it belongs to the place it was built. Whether it carries knowledge worth preserving.

Here’s where it matters for the argument: metis is the refusal to defer. It says the work happens here, in this soil, with these hands, today. Not when the system improves. Not when the theory is complete. Not when Version 2.0 arrives.

Which is precisely why high modernism can’t tolerate it.

V. The Alibi

But high modernism offers something metis doesn’t: comfort.

You can live the same mediocre life: concrete house, fossil fuel dependency, industrial food system, iPhone in your pocket and still signal progressive values. Tweet about exploitation. Perform activism. Demonstrate your alignment with the correct side of history.

The institution gives you cover. You’re part of the collective. You’re raising consciousness. You’re waiting for others to awaken so the real work can begin.

It’s the Version 2.0 Problem in miniature: you don’t have to change how you live because the system will change eventually. History is moving in the right direction and the progress is inevitable. Just maintain your subscription to the right ideology. Just keep signaling. Just wait. It’s a comfort you can’t afford to lose.

Even Sartre couldn’t resist. He staked everything on radical freedom, no essence preceding existence, no determinism, no external salvation. Just you and your choices and the terrifying responsibility of knowing there’s no script. He called it “condemned to be free.” Ideology, for Sartre, was bad faith: hiding behind systems that claim to know what you should do.

Then he became a Marxist. Suddenly history had a direction. The dialectic would resolve. Communism was inevitable. He spent Critique of Dialectical Reason trying to reconcile “you are radically free” with “history is moving toward communism whether you like it or not.”

I can’t tell if this was intellectual dishonesty, genuine evolution, or existential exhaustion — the need to believe that history would do the work consciousness couldn’t bear alone. Maybe Marxism was the boulder Sartre chose to push up the mountain, his way of committing to an impossible project because the alternative was unbearable.

The ambiguity is the point. Even the philosopher who established that ideology is bad faith retreated into one. The Version 2.0 Problem is that seductive.

Nietzsche didn’t have this problem. He didn’t believe in Progress. He didn’t dress his philosophy in historical inevitability. He stood in the ruins without reaching for a replacement.

That’s the difference between a philosopher and a believer.

VI. The Work

I'm sketching a piece of music. I might call it Maitreya.

Not because I believe in the Future Buddha or I think consciousness will evolve and that humanity is headed toward resolution. If anything, I’m deeply suspicious of all of that. I’m using the name because it marks the thing I’m wrestling with. The gap between what we promise ourselves and what actually arrives.

The music doesn’t resolve. It doesn’t offer catharsis. It doesn’t build to some triumphant conclusion where the tension releases and everyone goes home satisfied.

You might think that wouldn’t be music at all. You’d be wrong. Musicians know the trick. Bach wrote The Art of Fugue. Technically circular. You can keep playing it until you die. It’s cyclic. “Let us play this over and over again for it is beautiful.”

The Art of Fugue doesn’t resolve because resolution isn’t the goal. The beauty is in the recursive structure, the cyclic return, the pleasure of the pattern itself. You play it, it ends, you start again. Not because you’re waiting for something better. Because the thing itself is enough. Bach knew something about making beauty that exists outside high modernism’s demand for progress and resolution. You can’t standardize it. You practice it until you understand it by feel.

High modernism needs teleology. Music as narrative arc: tension, development, climax, resolution. Beginning, middle, end. But that’s not how existence works. There’s no resolution coming. The tension doesn’t resolve; it just continues until you stop hearing it. The journey doesn’t complete; you just run out of road.

I spent fifty days trying to get a single classical piece properly categorized across twelve music distribution platforms. The platforms were built by people who believe high modernism has solved music distribution. Everything can be algorithmically sorted. Everything fits the same template.

Except it doesn’t. Metis doesn’t scale. The things that matter to people who actually practice a craft are proper categorization, accurate metadata, respect for form. These don't register in systems designed for mass consumption.

When the practice doesn’t fit the theory, the problem is always with the practice.

VII. What Remains

Here’s the contradiction this essay can’t escape. I’m writing about ideology while standing inside one. I’m pointing at the Version 2.0 Problem while implicitly suggesting that recognizing it is somehow better, which is itself a version of the same problem. There’s no outside position. You can’t step out of ideology to critique ideology because the critique is already ideological.

Existentialism offers a way to live with this. Not a solution — a posture. You build meaning knowing the foundation is quicksand. You make choices knowing there’s no external validation. You take the broken system seriously because it’s the only system you have.

The comfort of the messiah myth, religious or secular, is that it lets you defer. Someone else will fix it. Progress will happen. Technology will solve. History will absolve. Maitreya will arrive.

No. There’s no fix coming. This is it. What are you going to do?

I’m still working on the piece. Still trying to figure out what it means to make something when you don’t believe in arrival. Maybe the point is that you make it anyway. Because the act of making is the only honest response to being stuck in a system that won’t resolve.

You can’t fix consciousness. You can’t opt out of mortality. You can’t wait for Version 2.0 because there is no Version 2.0.

So, you build things inside the broken version. Knowing they’re broken too. Knowing that whatever you make will be insufficient, temporary, and meaningless in a universe that doesn’t form grand schemes.

You build anyway. Just because you’re here and you have to do something with the time between birth and death, and making things feels slightly less absurd than not making things.

The music continues. Maitreya doesn’t arrive. The waiting is like waiting for Godot. Nothing resolves. The tension doesn’t release; it becomes the texture you live inside.

This isn’t despair. It isn’t hope. It’s the work of living without a messiah in a world that keeps promising one. The work of making things that don’t promise salvation. The work of building on foundations you know are provisional.

The work continues. That’s all there is.

It is what God did too.

The sample library industry is collapsing?
No! It’s just becoming redundant.

These were the original prompt farmers who recorded session musicians playing loops, phrases, chord progressions. They packaged musical sentences, so producers drag, drop and pretend. Nobody called it cheating. It was just how music is produced in most cases.

For decades, this was the deal: we’ll do the hard part, you assemble. Pay us once, produce forever.

But now the machines don’t need the samples. Suno doesn’t browse libraries. The middleman desires a funk guitar riff and the riff itself has been eliminated.

The prompt farmers have been outfarmed.

There’s an irony here that’s almost too clean.

These companies made music production easier. They lowered the barrier. They said: you don’t need to be a guitarist to have guitar in your track. You don’t need an orchestra. You don’t need years of practice. Just browse, audition, drag, drop.

They were right. And they built the expectation that music could be assembled from parts. That the craft was in selection and arrangement, not origination.

But they weren’t inventing a new shortcut; they were just digitizing a century-old factory floor. A hundred years ago, Tin Pan Alley perfected the “Standard.” They treated the song like an industrial blueprint, breaking it down into specialized cells of lyricists, melody-makers, and “pluggers.” They proved that the craft wasn’t in the mystery of origination, but in the efficiency of standardization. Modern software just turned those blueprints into digital assets. They built the expectation that music could be assembled from pre-optimized parts.

AI just took that logic to its conclusion.

If music is assembly, why not automate the assembly? If the value is in the final output, not the process, why pay for pre-made parts when the machine can make them fresh?

The sample library business was built on a philosophy that has been used against them.

Eastwest’s move is a survival choice. Either partner with AI or become irrelevant. They provide training data to ACE Studios—decades of orchestral recordings feeding the machine. In return, maybe they get AI intelligence in their sampler.

We have seen this branding play before, but with a physical soul. For years, companies released libraries like “Hans Zimmer Strings” or “Spitfire Abbey Road”. You bought the prestige of the player and the room. Now, an AI company may release the “Eastwest Strings Model.”

It won’t be a collection of files. It will be a neural network trained on their specific DNA. You won’t browse for a violin staccato; you will tell the model to be more Eastwest.

Maybe it works. Maybe their orchestral samples become the DNA of a new generation of AI composers. Maybe there’s a future where “Eastwest-trained AI” is a premium selling point. Or maybe they’re just selling the last of the grain before the farm gets bulldozed.

I don’t feel schadenfreude. I used these tools. Everyone did.

But I used them to replace the players and studio time when warranted. I am not a fan of the drag and drop thing, for it would make me sound like everyone else—which would be devastating for my position as a production music composer in a saturated industry.

Now I have moved to notations to preserve myself from the assimilation by the technology.

But I notice something: the composers I know who never relied heavily on libraries, the ones who wrote note by note, who orchestrated by hand, who treated samples as seasoning not structure—they’re less worried.

Not because they’re safe. Nobody is safe. But because their craft was never about assembly. The thing AI replaces most easily is the thing that was already closest to automation.

The prompt farmers are getting farmed.

The question for the rest of us: which part of our work is assembly? Which part is something else?

And do we know the difference?

So, I asked myself: is it just me who thinks the stakes are real?

I unlearned to be “productive” long ago.

But the theater is packed.

People already loved productivity hacks and looking busy. The meeting that could have been an email. The email that could have been nothing. The Gantt chart nobody reads. The status update performed for invisible audiences.

AI has not invented this disease. It has just made it acute.

AI-generated summaries of meetings that shouldn’t have happened. AI-assisted emails that say less in more words. Dashboards that track the tracking of trackable things. The productivity theater has gained a new special effects department.

We see it around. Writers have been the loudest voices against AI. When it comes to AI, people talk about jobs and writing. These look the popular concerns. But musicians know something writers don’t.

The dominant complaint is plagiarism. AI trains on copyrighted work. It swallows and spits without attribution. It steals style, voice, craft.

These are real concerns, not the real stakes.

The objection isn’t about unauthorized text. It’s something deeper. Something harder to name. By fighting on plagiarism grounds, we obscure the actual philosophical rupture.

And here’s what I know personally: music has had prompt farmers for decades. Long before Suno wrote its first delta blues, producers were stitching together phrase libraries, loop packs, sample collections: dragging and dropping prebuilt musical sentences into arrangements. Nobody called it theft. Nobody demanded attribution to the anonymous session musician who played that funk guitar loop in 1997.

Literature wants to believe it’s special and the words are different, the novel is sacred ground.

No. Literature is as special as any creation. No more, no less.

The only question has ever been how much prompt farming? How much of the work is assembly versus origination. And notably, the loudest complaints don’t come from the composers and writers doing the deepest work. They know the deeper truth. They’ve always known.

Gutenberg has just printed his bibles again. This time, they are not 180 copies but billions, because they’re digital. It looks colossal because we’re already standing inside the productivity theater. The new scenery dwarfs everything we built before.

The real question isn’t “who owns these words?”

The real questions are harder.

What happens when effort and output decouple entirely? We maintained a rough correlation for centuries. The thing someone made bore some relationship to the time and attention they gave it. AI breaks this. A person can produce a 5,000-word essay in thirty seconds. If you can’t tell by reading it, does the origin matter?

What happens when everyone can produce anything? Scarcity shaped culture. The barriers created value beyond economics—the meaning. Difficulty was part of significance.

What happens to the relationship between struggle and meaning? We read the maker’s attention in the made. AI-generated content encodes only a request.

The writers are right to be worried. But they’re worried about the wrong thing.

Or perhaps: they’re worried about the thing they can articulate, because the real worry resists articulation.

The plagiarism debate is a distraction. It lets us fight about law and attribution while ignoring the philosophical abyss underneath.

Meanwhile, the productivity theater continues.

AI hasn’t made us more “productive”. It has made us more prolific at performing productivity.

The gap between “busy” and “useful” was already wide. AI has made it a canyon.

We generate more. We accomplish less. We are artificially productive for artificial reasons.

What does authenticity mean when everything can be synthesized? I don’t have answers. But the questions feel urgent and underexplored. Maybe that’s the point. We’re too busy to ask the questions that really matter. Like we have always been. And I know this will pass too. Like how it has been, always.

For readers unfamiliar: Subramania Bharathi (1882–1921), is our Whitman-meets-Yeats. Democratic fire with mystical intensity. He wrote fierce songs against British colonialism, against caste discrimination, for women’s liberation. They are radical even by today’s standards. His poems remain sung at protests, weddings, school assemblies. He died young, poor, struck by an elephant at a temple. The kind of death that makes legends.

Caste is the crux of Tamil Nadu politics, if not of entire India. From creating narratives to appointing candidates, everything tied with caste calculus.

I recall days when I engaged in debates like these, believing facts and logical arguments would change minds. I’d compile quotes, context, historical evidence. I’d type long responses with citations. I believed in the power of correct information.

Now I watch them continue debates, passionate about positions that will reverse in next election cycle. I sit quiet at tables where friends parse Bharathi’s verse. I feel lonely.

Vilfredo Pareto, the same one behind the 80/20 rule, developed something less famous but more devastating. His theory argues that human action springs from non-logical sources. Residues are deep drives: instincts for preservation, group belonging, maintaining what exists. Derivations are the elaborate justifications we construct afterward. Logic isn’t the engine. It’s the paint job. Pareto saw that humans find relief in believing themselves rational.

Watch the Bharathi debate with Pareto’s lens. The poems haven’t changed. Bharathi hasn’t written anything new recently, being dead since 1921. But suddenly he needs re-evaluation. Why now? Because someone needs him problematic for today’s political formation. Someone else needs him progressive for theirs.

The same verse that was revolutionary last decade becomes casteist this decade. Not because we discovered new meaning. Because we need new ammunition.

The comedy is watching people cite the same poems to prove opposite points. Like Bharathi wrote in quantum states, simultaneously progressive and regressive until political observation collapses him into one.

Pareto's theory was funny when I read it at thirty. Now it doesn’t sound funny. He was documenting tragedy as sociology.

The loneliness isn’t from disagreement. It’s from seeing the mechanism. Like watching a magic show from backstage. You see the strings, the trapdoors, the assistant crouched in the “empty” box. You can’t unsee it. You also can’t participate anymore. Not honestly.

Sometimes they ask why I don’t engage. “You used to have such strong opinions,” they say. I do. The opinion is that we’re all performing derivations while our residues run the show. But saying that out loud is social suicide. So, I just smile. Another derivation to hide my residue: exhaustion with the whole performance.

The cost of knowing what Pareto knew: you become audience to a play where everyone else is cast and script. You lose the comfort of believing in belief itself. Every passionate argument sounds like sophisticated noise.

But you still show up. Still sit at the tables. Still perform enough derivations to stay connected. Because the residue for belonging is stronger than the knowledge that belonging requires performed blindness.

Pareto knew something. Knowing what he knew doesn’t set you free. It just makes you conscious of the cage while you remain inside it.

Years ago, I remember writing to Apple asking how to get my music on iTunes. Apple Music wasn’t even born yet. They replied-professionally, helpfully introducing me to music distributors that I didn’t know existed.

Apple literally started me on this journey. The irony of what follows has not been lost on me.

Day 1: The Optimistic Beginning

I wrote my debut book on artist rights history in Tamil, starting from before the printing press. Apparently, I’m drawn to obsolete battles, because next I decided to become a classical composer in the streaming age.

I was inspired by the sheet music era and stories of Handel and Bach (who never had to argue with an algorithm about genre classifications), I moved from my DAW to a notation software. When I finished my first Piano work, I felt accomplished. After years of writing sync music in isolation, I was ready to share something that was truly mine.

Day 13: The First Encounter

RouteNote used to be free and took WAV files. Now they’re still free but only accept MP3s for the free plan. Look, I get the economics. Storage costs money, and I’m not exactly generating Spotify millions. Algorithms don’t chase me and I don’t chase them; we have a mutual non-aggression pact.

But twenty days for customer support? Twenty days! Wagner could have written another Ring Cycle. That’s when I realized the distribution landscape had transformed while I was peacefully writing sync music.

Day 45: CDBaby and the Discovery

I recalled having a decade old release with CDBaby. Decided to move to CDBaby. It is not free, but they responded before I forgot I’d written to them. Days later, I found my music on Apple Music Classical. I didn’t even know this existed. It’s like discovering a secret room in your house with your furniture already there.

Encouraged, I released a Sonatina and started a Theme and Variations that took sleepless nights.

Day 73: The Hunt for HD Audio

CDBaby doesn’t accept HD audio. Yes, most people listen on phone speakers that make everything sound underwater. But what if want to preserve the rosin of the first chairs for the twelve audiophiles who care. They’re my people. I was writing my new Passacaglia for them.

I decided to try a distributor marketing special platform relationship. I subscribed, submitted, and then...

Day 89: The Genre Wars

They insisted my classical work should be labeled “Instrumental.”

“But it’s a Theme and Variations. In C Major. With….”

“Instrumental.”

“It follows classical form…”

“INSTRUMENTAL.“

I let them distribute it their way. Then it appeared in Qobuz’s Pop section.

POP.

“Echoes in My Chamber: Theme and Variations in C Major, Op.3, No.1” sitting next to contemporary hits. That was the day I dropped opus numbers from titles. If you can’t beat them, stop giving them ammunition.

Don’t ask me why I use opus numbers. I know I am not Beethoven. Because he started losing hearing at my age, but I am just developing tinnitus.

Day 112: The Landscape Survey

Back to CDBaby, who distributed it properly. No drama, just basic competence. Revolutionary.

But still no HD audio. The search continued:

Ditto Music: No HD audio
LANDr: No Classical to Apple Music
iMusician: Want classical AND high-definition audio? That’s their top tier. Though credit where due, they keep your music up even if you stop paying.
Soundrop: The interface seemed to be having an existential crisis. Each edit created a new release. But wait—they accept high-definition audio, and at $0.99 per track? Their system must be flooded with everyone writing a passacaglia for strings to leave a legacy.

Day 124: Understanding the Game

I get it now. Serious distributors are expensive or invite-only because they’re filtering for people who actually make money. Classical metadata requires extra work that isn’t worth it for bedroom producers generating three streams annually.

Then Soundrop raised prices to $4.99. I actually felt relieved. Even their interface seems to be relieved from creating new releases on its own.(pay-per-release is better than subscriptions in my opinion, even if they are expensive.)

Day 126: The TuneCore Tragedy

Desperate, I paid TuneCore’s annual subscription. Then discovered:

They only have “Classical Crossover” (Bach feat. Billie Eilish?)
They can’t deliver classical to Apple Music
Refund policy: “All sales are final” (That is not a refund policy!)

My only real complaint? Tell me upfront. Don’t let me pay THEN mention you can’t deliver to a platform I want to.

Day 156: The Horus Compromise

TuneCore refunded me on request.

Then came Horus Music. They accept classical. They handle HD audio. They seem competent. Responsive customer care. The catch? I can’t choose individual stores.

So, the Passacaglia lives on Boomplay but not Qobuz. It’s like carefully plating a meal, then watching someone serve it wherever they feel like.

But at least it’s reaching somewhere, properly labeled, in the quality I intended.

Day 168: Bandcamp Discovers Curation

Meanwhile, Bandcamp, the one place where my music sits exactly where I put it, introduced “expert curated” playlist subscriptions for fans.

Even the direct pipe wants to become a platform. Even the place that let you just be now wants intermediaries between artist and listener. The experts will curate. The fans will subscribe. The algorithm creeps in through the back door, wearing a turtleneck and calling itself “human curation.”

I understood the economics before it happened. I still felt the weight when it did.

Day 171: The Collective Gambit

Which brings me to Subvert, a collectively owned music platform. Musicians owning the infrastructure. No algorithmic intermediaries. No genre wars with distant support teams.

The irony isn’t lost on me: I spent 170 days navigating distribution chaos, only to help build another platform. But this time, the inmates run the asylum. We’re the ones deciding where the Passacaglia lives.

Will it work? Ask me in another 170 days.

For now, I’m a founding member of a cooperative while simultaneously being distributed by Horus to platforms I don’t control, maintaining my Bandcamp where I have complete control, but curators are arriving, and figuring out what Subvert is going to be.

Epilogue

I’ve picked Soundrop for my next release. Unsubscribed from Horus Music today. They’re taking down the Passacaglia from Boomplay.

The question that persists: Is distributing to streaming platforms worth all this trouble?

This isn’t just my story. Many artists live this. They just don’t write about it.
That’s the difference.

PS: This post I published elsewhere. This is a revised edition with updates

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That is technically functional but fundamentally wrong. So, I traced it back to the source: LinkedIn. That platform where everyone begins their posts with rocket emojis and their career trajectories pretend to make sense.

LinkedIn wanted me to pick: full-time, part-time, employed, or self-employed?

The platform already had my education and my past industry positions that could look unconnected and strange to anyone seeking a narrative arc like someone threw darts at a career board blindfolded.

I went to LinkedIn to remove “self-employment”
“Tell me your employment status,” LinkedIn insisted.

But I am not employed. I am not self-employed. I am not a composer who builds. I am not a builder who composes. I am someone who sees foam pyramids everywhere and occasionally makes things that don’t lie.

The platform wanted me to network. To connect. To build my professional brand.

But I was already connected to the harmonic series I follow, to the earth I compress, to readers who don’t need algorithms to find me. My “network” includes structural engineers who trust my density calculations and musicians who understand why I ruthlessly kill darlings in my Chaconne’s second act.

So, I deleted my profile.

Then I recreated an empty profile as a placeholder to show that parking slot is reserved for someone who just sold their car.

Google will update eventually.

LinkedIn asked what I do.
I deleted the question.
That’s the most honest answer I could give.

P.S. - If you found this without LinkedIn suggesting we connect, you’re already outside their pyramid. The air’s clearer here, even if we’re all still pretending it means something.

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It begins melancholic, with a theme that knows something you don’t yet. Call it retrospective, the kind of melody that carries the weight of looking back, of understanding things only in hindsight. This is our protagonist: a musical thought that already holds its ending in its beginning.

But music, like life, rarely stays in one emotional place. There’s this moment, not quite arrival, not quite departure, where the piece begins to stretch toward something else. Think of it as that liminal space when you’re no longer who you were but not yet who you’re becoming. The music warms up here, transitions, breathes differently. It’s testing the air of a brighter place but hasn’t committed yet.

Then, our second theme unfurls with an energy that feels almost defiant against all that retrospection. It sings, it dances, it insists on present-tense joy. But even joy has gravity, and eventually, this theme descends, slowing, as if remembering that all things that rise must touch ground again.

The middle section is where the alchemy happens. The opening theme returns; but altered. Like looking at your childhood home through different eyes. The music breaks into fragments, these pieces of memory scattering and reforming. There are notes here that slide between the expected ones and those in-between sounds that don’t quite belong but somehow feel truer because of their strangeness.

There’s this moment that speaks to me most deeply. It’s the musical equivalent of homesickness, but for a home that might only exist in memory. The opening idea speaks here with a longing that feels almost too personal to share.

When the dancing theme returns, something has transformed. Same notes, same rhythm. But not the same. It’s like meeting an old friend after years apart; the familiarity is there, but both of you have been changed by time and distance. The journey has done its work.

The ending brings us home with those sliding, in-between notes again—sounds that suggest maybe home isn’t a fixed point but a constellation of possibilities.

It understands that repetition is never really repetition. Every return is also a revision. Every homecoming is also a departure. It knows what we sometimes forget. That transformation isn’t about becoming someone else, but about becoming more fully who we always were, just couldn’t see it yet.

When you listen, you might hear something entirely different. That’s the beauty of it. The narrative I hear is just one path through this sonic landscape. Your ears might find different stories in these same sounds.

I’m curious. What journey do you hear when the opening theme first emerges? Does the dancing theme feel like arrival or escape to you? Sometimes I think the most honest music is the kind that asks more questions than it answers, that leaves space for each listener to find their own emotional geography within its measures.

A closing thought: What draws me to this piece, and perhaps to music in general is, how different musical ideas can live in conversation with each other. The retrospective theme and the dancing one aren’t just contrasts; they’re in dialogue, changing each other through their interaction. This feels true. We’re all made of contrasting voices, different versions of ourselves in conversation. The beauty isn’t in resolving these contrasts but in letting them speak to each other, transform each other, and ultimately create something richer than either could alone.

1. News about the Spotify lawsuit

The argument is that AI bots play Drake’s songs, he collects royalties, and it is cheating.

Everyone is sharing the lawsuit. Screenshots. Opinions. Drake’s name is the hook. The lawsuit is the headline. But neither is the story. They are only the visible tip. The rest sinks beneath the surface.

If you’ve never heard of payola

In the 1950s, American radio was rocked by a scandal that exposed the music industry.
Known as the “payola” scandal, it revealed a widespread practice where record companies secretly paid radio DJs to play specific songs, manipulating the charts and public tastes.

But payola never disappeared. We have “playlist pitching,” “marketing budgets,” “fan engagement services,” etc. The industry pretends the numbers are organic. Everyone else pretends to believe it.

At the core is a system that rewards inflation. Spotify pays artist royalties from a single pool. The artist with the most streams, takes the largest share. Fake streams do not evaporate. They steal from someone else.

But fixing one fraud inside a pro-rata system is cosmetic. The math itself is broken. It is theft even without a fake stream. It works because it looks like math. You cannot clean a pool that keeps filling from a dirty pipe.

The lawsuit is not trying to punish Drake. It is trying to make the machine show its gears. Everyone is staring at the tip of the iceberg. The rest is still underwater.

For years, musicians relied on platforms like Bandcamp to sell directly to fans without a middleman. Bandcamp was sold twice. It wasn’t killed the way AmieStreet was. But unlike Spotify, Bandcamp relies on a human algorithm these days.

Ventures like Magnatune could not survive either.

2. The new music platform Subvert is in its alpha phase

I am writing this as a founding member of the platform. A music platform owned by its users through a cooperative structure. Musicians, fans, and workers get ownership stakes. One member, one vote.

The clever part? They separated the co-op (which holds voting control) from the business entity (which can take investment). Investors can put money in but cannot control decisions. It is structurally different.

Co-ops aren’t new. They are 19th-century solutions to 19th-century problems, now applied to 21st-century platforms.

Why I joined Subvert

I am not Western enough for classical music, and not traditional enough for Carnatic music. Wrong for traditional labels, too weird for algorithm categories. I generally exist in the margins between systems.

But here’s the thing: I need to sell music somewhere. The choice isn’t between platforms and no platforms. It is between platforms that admit they are platforms and platforms that pretend they are movements.

Every platform promises to be different until it needs to be sustainable. Then the math takes over. Co-op ownership doesn’t change the math, but it changes who does the calculations. That makes it different.

I am a founding member of Subvert the way I am a composer of classical music. Using inherited structures without accepting their embedded assumptions. Even for someone skeptical, the co-op model is not worse than the corporate model. That is enough reason to participate while maintaining clarity about what participation means.

Subvert is a platform where being an edge case isn’t a bug. Co-ops don’t need to categorize you into pre-existing boxes to extract value. They need you to bring what you bring. The weirder the members, the richer the ecosystem.

If you are either an artist or a music lover interested in the conversation, you are invited

The bottom line

The Spotify lawsuit will pass. The headlines will fade. Platforms will adjust their language and continue as usual.

But with Subvert, ownership changes behavior. When the users hold the keys, manipulation becomes pointless. You do not need bots to steal from yourself.

A system built on extraction needs noise to survive. A system built on participation only needs signal. That is the difference.

That is why Subvert exists.

Subvert — The Collectively Owned Music Marketplace

I was strict about the bedroom boundary. When I returned after a month of work, she had colonized my side of the bed, specifically seeking my used clothes, my towels—anything that held my scent.

We developed a language. Different meows for different needs, accompanied by specific gestures. Sometimes I assume I understand. Understanding gives comfort, even when it’s constructed. Even unbearable problems become bearable when I believe I understand them.

By my work table sits a window. I work late nights; the kitten turned nocturnal with me. We became creatures of parallel rhythm, sleeping through the day while the world conducted its business. Through that window, she would hunt. One midnight, a lizard. I told my family to watch her—snakes live where we live.

I began closing the window at night.

The monsoon is late this year. Two weeks of moderate rain. Three nights ago, she stood by that window with a specific meow—eyes almost closed, a particular insistence I’d learned to read.

I opened the window. Let her go.

When I finished work and prepared for bed, she hadn’t returned. As I’d done previous nights, I closed the window. Previous nights, she’d waited on the portico until morning. This time, morning came without her.

It was Diwali night when she left. Firecrackers, rain—reasons for a cat to hide. She was in heat, female, not spayed. Perhaps she went for love. We have no solid reasoning. For two days, the family mood hung heavy.

Cat, dog, human—we construct memories, inquiries. I ask myself: what if I hadn’t closed the window? No solid answer comes. I look at the window while working, expecting her head between the grills before she jumps in.

Yesterday I told my son she would be happy somewhere, especially if she’d gone for love. Or I wanted to tell myself that. This doesn’t change that I’m not a cat person. Maybe she wasn’t a cat to me. I cannot articulate what I mean.

My son wanders at dusk and dawn, ringing the bell she played with.

Today, while I worked, looking at the window between sessions, my wife’s voice interrupted: “Please don’t start anything significant this week. Either music or something else. We want you this week.”

She’s right. The washing machine has waited a month for installation. I live in a rammed earth house I built—no plumber or electrician works without my presence. They need me when walls are involved. The new location requires drilling through rammed earth for the water outlet. Local plumbers tried once, thinking it was just a “mud wall.”

Like cats, walls have our mental constructs. I don’t think we can see anything without them.

When my wife says don’t start anything significant, she means something. At times, I venture into something and don’t return as expected.

Like the cat for whom we still wait.

Nina Protocol is a music platform that stores songs on blockchain—think of it like carving your music into stone tablets instead of writing it in notebooks. The notebooks (Bandcamp, SoundCloud) can burn or get thrown away when companies sell or shut down. The stone tablets are supposed to last forever, scattered across thousands of computers instead of sitting on one company’s server that can get unplugged. Whether they actually will is another question.

But first, I need to tell you about the electronic musicians on Bandcamp.

The Warmth

They follow me. Electronic producers, ambient artists, experimental musicians. We don’t discuss music. We have nothing in common aesthetically. I’m not making what they’re making, they’re not making what I’m making.

But they follow. Across platforms. I’m on Bandcamp, they’re there. I post somewhere on Reddit, they show up. It’s not about my music. It’s something else.

And here’s the strange part: they’re the warmest musical community I’ve ever encountered. Not competitive. Not cold. Not performing prestige. Just... present. Ready to connect. Ready to help if asked.

I didn’t understand it until I started researching Nina Protocol.

The Paint Store

There’s a paint store in my town run by a Sri Lankan Tamil man. I’ve heard he provides refuge; his own people who can’t find a job end up there, doing painting labor. He’s successful, well-known. But the refuge remains.

I thought about him when I saw a music tech company’s promotional video featuring an electronic artist I recognized. Big spotlight, corporate endorsement, sleek product demos. Success. Visibility. Legitimacy.

But I won’t be surprised if this artist still follows hundreds of bedroom producers on Bandcamp, still engages with Nina Protocol conversations, still a part of the network, despite the spotlight.

The paint store owner could just be a successful businessman. The artist could just be a successful producer. But something stays. Some kinship hidden in the heart. Some memory that success doesn’t erase.

Why?

What I Found on Nina

Nina Protocol is all electronic music. Experimental, leftfield, underground. No Beatport commercial EDM. No top 40. Just... refugees.

That’s what it felt like browsing it. Artists with no institutional backing, no major label support, no concert hall bookings. Making music in bedrooms, basements, home studios. Uploading to platforms that might not exist in five years.

It reminded me of the Sri Lankan refugee camps I’ve glimpsed near my hometown. Not in a political way. I’m not making deep comparisons. Just... the feeling. Temporary shelters. Communities forming in displacement. People helping each other survive in spaces that weren’t built for permanence.

Electronic musicians have been doing this for decades.

The Pattern

I started digging into the history of platforms I witnessed. What I found was startling.

MP3.com : One of the first platforms where independent electronic musicians could distribute music. Lawsuits killed it. Music lost.

MySpace: The golden era. Dubstep, grime, electro-house, indie electronic and entire genres born there. MySpace democratized electronic music distribution. Then Facebook won the social media war. MySpace declined. A server migration catastrophically failed and deleted an estimated 50 million songs just gone. Years of work. Entire scenes. Erased.

SoundCloud : After MySpace lost its glory, everyone moved here. Vaporwave, future bass, lo-fi house, SoundCloud rap. Then: copyright strikes, near-bankruptcy with mass layoffs, endless monetization crises. It still exists, figuring out its own ground in a new reality.

Bandcamp : The refuge after SoundCloud’s uncertainty. Artist-friendly. Fair revenue split. Community-focused. Then: Sold to Epic Games. Sold again to Songtradr. Approximately 50% of staff laid off. Union not recognized. Editorial team gutted.

And now: Nina Protocol: Web3, blockchain, promises of permanence. Launched in 2021, relaunched with a simplified interface in 2023. Artists keep 100% of primary sales. Music stored on Arweave. It is permanent storage on blockchain—the stone tablets as we discussed earlier.

Web3 is the idea of a decentralized internet where users own their data and content instead of corporations controlling everything. Right now, platforms like Bandcamp or SoundCloud are landlords, they own the building, you rent space, and if they sell or shut down, you lose everything.

Web3 promises to make you the owner, your music lives on a distributed network (blockchain) that no single company controls. You hold the deed, not a rental agreement.

Whether that promise actually works is still being tested.

In August 2025, Numero Group announced via Instagram they were moving their catalog to Nina Protocol. Not abandoning Bandcamp entirely, but diversifying.

But one can see the pattern. Every platform promises stability. Every platform eventually fails or changes or gets sold. And electronic musicians pack up and migrate again.

This goes back further than digital platforms. In the 1940s and 50s, experimental composers needed access to radio studios just to make electronic music. The institutions controlled the means of production.

In the 1980s, Chicago house and Detroit techno producers bought discontinued Roland equipment, the TB-303 bass synthesizer, the TR-808 drum machine because they were commercial failures. Roland had discontinued them. The producers made art from corporate waste.

Always displaced. Always migrating. Always building temporary homes.

Why “Underground”?

I used to think “underground” meant the sound. Experimental, uncommercial, weird.

But I think it means something else now.

Underground means beneath institutions. By choice? By exclusion? Or more nuanced?

But what I see is the Underground that’s temporary like literal resistance movements constantly relocating as a defense strategy. No permanent headquarters. Always moving.

Refugee status as a permanent condition? A survival strategy? Or something else entirely?

The Bandcamp Shift

Here’s what I think Numero Group smelled.

Bandcamp started as anti-algorithmic. Fan-driven discovery. Artist control. Community recommendations. No Spotify-style AI curators deciding what you hear.

Then, it launched “Bandcamp Clubs.” Curated subscriptions. A connoisseur picks music for you. Thirteen dollars a month.

It’s not an algorithm—it’s human algorithms. Gatekeepers with better branding.

The warmth was being replaced with editorial control. The community was becoming an institution.

Numero Group has institutional memory. They’ve watched platforms die before. They smelled what happens next: Bandcamp stops being a refuge and starts being a business. The community leaves. The pattern repeats.

So Numero Group went to Nina. Not because Nina is guaranteed to survive. But because you don’t put all your eggs in one basket when you’re either a refugee or a rebellion.

The Brotherhood

I think I finally understand why electronic musicians follow me on Bandcamp.

It’s not about my music. It’s not about shared taste or aesthetic alignment.

It’s about the network.

When MySpace had a crisis, people with strong ties, close collaborators, deep friendships that often lost contact entirely. People with weak ties—hundreds of follows but minimal interaction—found each other on the next platform. Someone remembered. Someone reconnected.

Electronic musicians have been building this resilient network for decades. Following broadly. Staying present. Not because they love everyone’s music. Because when the next platform dies, it will and someone will be there when they arrive at the next one.

They’re adding me to that network. Not because they listen to my work. Because I’m present in digital spaces. Because maybe I understand precarity even if I haven’t fully experienced it yet. Because maybe someday I’ll be a refugee too.

The warmth isn’t friendship. It’s mutual aid as insurance policy. I help you now, you help me later.

Following = “I see you. You exist. When this platform dies, I’ll remember you were here.”

That’s the brotherhood. Not deep ties. Not collaboration. Just... distributed presence across platforms. The survival network of the displaced.

The Hidden Kinship

The music tech company artist still following bedroom producers. The paint store owner still hiring his people who can’t find work. Electronic musicians still following me even though we make completely different music.

Success doesn’t erase the memory of being both refugee and rebel.

The paint store owner remembers what it’s like to need refuge. The artist remembers the underground even with the corporate spotlight. The electronic musicians remember or know it could happen to them.

And they maintain the network because they know: platforms die, institutions crumble, and when that happens, the only thing that survives is the kinship you built when you didn’t need it yet.

Why It Keeps Happening

I keep asking myself: why does this pattern repeat? Why can’t electronic music find stable infrastructure?

I have theories, not answers.

Maybe it’s capitalism. Platforms need growth. Growth requires monetization. Monetization requires gatekeepers, algorithms or curators. Gatekeepers kill the community warmth. The community leaves. A new platform emerges. Repeat.

Maybe it’s the nature of digital spaces. Physical institutions last centuries. Concert halls from the 1800s still host music. But digital platforms? Five to ten years, then corporate acquisition or death.

Maybe it’s also the law. Copyright, platform liability, artist rights. The legal framework keeps chasing technology, always a few steps behind, leaving artists perpetually vulnerable to whoever controls the infrastructure.

Maybe displacement is just the condition. Not a problem to solve. Just... the reality. And maybe the warmth, the mutual aid, the resilient networks, maybe those only exist because of the displacement.

Nina and What Comes After

Is Nina Protocol different? Will blockchain actually create “infrastructure for the next 50 years of music” like they claim?

I don’t know.

The technology is interesting. Music stored permanently. Artists keep 100% of primary sales.

But I’ve read the critiques too. The music is publicly downloadable by anyone who knows where to look on the blockchain. The permanence cuts both ways. There was drama in 2023 about Arweave potentially forking, splitting into competing versions, and whether that could delete all existing data. Nina uses third-party services that could fail. The crypto wallet system is confusing for many artists.

Solana is the blockchain Nina uses for transactions. Think of it as the payment queue.

When you buy music on Nina, Solana processes that transaction quickly (like a fast checkout) instead of the slow, expensive processing that happens on older blockchains like Bitcoin or Ethereum.

It’s separate from Arweave (the permanent storage/stone tablets). Solana handles the buying and selling, Arweave handles the keeping forever. Two different jobs

I think the question isn’t whether Nina will survive.

The question is: what comes after Nina?

Because something always does. The refugees and rebels will move again. They always have.

What I Learned

That Reddit commenter asking “Why would Numero Group leave Bandcamp?” had institutional thinking. “Why leave what works?”

But Numero Group has refugee thinking. Eighty years of watching platforms rise and fall. They don’t trust any single platform to last. They build networks everywhere. They maintain kinship with the displaced even when they’re successful enough not to need it.

The electronic musicians who follow me on Bandcamp? They’re living refugee and rebel thinking every day. The follow button is their paint store.

And maybe that’s what “underground” really means. Perpetually displaced. Always building temporary shelter while knowing it won’t last.

And maybe that’s not a problem. Maybe that’s just the condition.

The Foundation

F minor. The key of deep introspection, of questions asked in darkness. The bass line descends, circles back on itself, creates a harmonic prison that feels both inevitable and inescapable. Like walking the same four hallways of a building, discovering new details each time but never finding the exit.

The passacaglia form originated in 17th-century Spain as a street dance. Street music became court music became sacred music—transformation through repetition, exactly what this piece explores.

The Variations

Each variation is a room built on the same foundation, yet opening onto different views. The first few variations feel like basement chambers—low strings exploring the depths of the harmonic cycle, finding beauty in constraint.

By the middle variations, we’ve climbed to ground level. Violins begin their conversations, fragments of melody that suggest windows, doorways, possibilities. The same harmonic foundation now supports different architectures of hope.

The final variations ascend toward something resembling joy—not the naive happiness that ignores darkness, but the earned lightness that comes from having walked through it. The strings don’t abandon the bass line; they transform its meaning.

The Resolution

We end not by escaping the cycle, but by learning to dance within it. The same eight measures that felt like chains now feel like a rhythm, a heartbeat, a home base from which to venture out and return.

The passacaglia taught me something essential: transformation doesn’t require abandoning the foundation. Sometimes freedom comes not from breaking the pattern, but from discovering new ways to move within it.

My first "DAW" was a PASCAL program I wrote, using the PC speaker for beep sounds (pre-multimedia era), sending frequency values in Hz to produce music. A string input would generate a melody. Raag Amrithavarshini was convincing even without gamak- the pitch bends

The first actual DAW I used is now in a museum. Its developer creates iOS apps these days. Time moves differently in software years.

My friendship with algorithms is lengthy and laborious. I've watched them evolve from simple IF-THEN statements to neural networks that write marketing blogs and songs that could flood Spotify.

I said it was lengthy and laborious.

Lengthy: Sitting through debates about whether we were in the fourth or fifth generation during Prolog sessions.

But what haunts me still is the laborious part: The practical exam asked me to find a factorial. I know—finding factorial is easy for an exam. But not with a processor console that takes hexadecimal inputs. That's MACHINE LANGUAGE.

I guess people often misunderstand what “rigorous study” means. But I never hated algorithms. Even when they classified my Theme and Variations as Pop in one instance. If you are from India, Theme and Variations is like Niraval in Carnatic. You pick a theme and play the variations of the same.

Actually, I tried a French overture style variation. After writing the scores, either it wasn't convincing, or I found a better inspiration. But I kept the bass part of the overture style for that ceremonial gravity. Algorithm caught it “Pop Beat”.

A distributor put it under different classification, and the platform it was distributed to does not have a slot for that classification.

I realized: Algorithm and me. We both trying to process music through systems designed for three-minute pop songs. Neither of us fits the framework.

That's why we have our pact. Algorithms don't chase me (my Spotify stats confirm this), and I don't chase them. We recognize each other as edge cases in our respective worlds

The algorithm that put my Theme and Variations in the Pop section wasn't broken. It was doing exactly what it was told with the limited options it had. The humans who built the system never imagined someone would upload "Echoes in My Chamber: Theme and Variations"

Edge cases, both of us. That's our kinship.

Van Steyn had heard the stories for months. Local fishermen spoke of "Buaya Darat"—The land crocodiles, on islands they avoided after dark. Curiosity burned in Van Steyn’s his chest.

He pushed through dense jungle, branches whipping across his face. The forest air was humid and heavy. Towering trees groaned against each other in the wind.

Then he encountered it.

A ten-foot-long, saw-toothed lizard emerged from a bush. The creature's forked tongue flicked out, tasting the air. Van Steyn's spine turned to ice. The world had never known such a creature existed.

News of the Komodo dragon exploded across newspapers worldwide.

The Birth of a Monster

Merian Cooper, a Hollywood director, was captivated by the discovery. His appetite for adventure stories had found its perfect meal.

When Cooper's friend, adventurer William Douglas Burden, announced his plan to hunt Komodo dragons in 1926, Cooper listened intently. Burden returned with two live specimens for the Bronx Zoo, where crowds pressed against barriers to glimpse these prehistoric survivors.

But it was Burden's stories, not the dragons themselves that ignited Cooper's imagination. Tales of an island shaped like a skull, of dangers lurking in the jungle, of bringing a monster back to civilization. These seeds grew in Cooper's mind into something magnificent: a giant ape discovered on a remote island and dragged to New York City.

King Kong was born from the collision of a real dragon and a dreamer's ambition.

The Strategic Novel

Cooper was shrewd. Before filming began, he had writer friend Delos W. Lovelace transform his screenplay into a novel, published a year before the movie's release. This wasn't just merchandising. It was building hunger.

The gambit worked. When "King Kong" hit theaters in 1933, it conquered. The image of Kong atop the Empire Building became iconic.

Cooper had been obsessed with gorillas since age six. Once, while filming in Africa, encountering baboons gave him the idea for an ape protagonist. The name came to him like a drumbeat: "Kong... there was something mysterious about it."

King Kong vs. Godzilla: The Shock

Cooper believed his rights to King Kong belonged to him alone.

Then came that morning in 1962.

Cooper's coffee froze halfway to his lips. There in the newspaper was an advertisement: "King Kong vs. Godzilla." His Kong. Fighting a Japanese monster. Without his permission.

With trembling fingers, he called his lawyer.

Investigation revealed that RKO Pictures, the studio that produced his original film, had sold King Kong's rights to Japan's Toho Studios behind his back. They'd also been selling comics and merchandise, profiting from Cooper's creation.

Cooper's original contract with RKO was clear: he would direct for a salary but retain character rights. RKO couldn't sell Kong without his permission. They had anyway.

Cooper sued, but victory eluded him. During his service as a World War II pilot, crucial documents had vanished—including papers that proved Kong belonged to him.

The Remake Wars: 1975

By 1975, Hollywood had transformed, but King Kong's power remained unchanged. Italian producer Dino De Laurentiis decided a Kong remake would print money. He paid RKO handsomely for remake rights.

Universal Studios, having lost the bidding, responded with an absurd claim: they'd been "verbally promised" the rights.

Then Universal's lawyers discovered something everyone had forgotten: Delos Lovelace's novel. The copyright had expired. No one had renewed it. The novel had slipped into public domain.

Universal announced they would produce "The Legend of King Kong" based on this public domain novel. They even began pre-production, pressuring De Laurentiis.

In 1976, an out-of-court settlement ended the fight. Universal shelved their production. De Laurentiis released his remake successfully.

The Son Fights Back

Cooper died in 1973. His son Richard inherited the fight.

Richard Cooper went to court with fresh lawyers and old grievances. The verdict finally came:

Cooper's contract with RKO covered only the original "King Kong" and "Son of Kong." Every subsequent deal RKO made was unauthorized. Those profits belonged to Cooper's heirs.

The novel remained in public domain. But the character of King Kong? That belonged to the Coopers.

Richard sold these rights to Universal Studios.

Donkey Kong: When Nintendo Met Kong

1982. Arcade games were conquering the world quarter by quarter. In a Seattle bar, players pumped coins into a machine where a carpenter named Jumpman (later Mario) rescued his girlfriend from an ape.

The game was Donkey Kong. Universal smelled opportunity.

Fresh from purchasing Cooper's rights, Universal sued Nintendo for trademark infringement. Nintendo hired John Kirby, whose strategy was devastating.

Kirby excavated Universal's own arguments from 1976 — where Universal had claimed King Kong was public domain. He presented these arguments back to Universal like a mirror.

The judge didn't just rule against Universal; he excoriated them for hypocrisy. The court also noted that "Donkey Kong" and "King Kong" were entirely different names.

Nintendo's victory was so complete, they celebrated magnificently. They gifted John Kirby a $30,000 sailboat named "Donkey Kong." They also named a pink, spherical video game character after him—Kirby—who would star in dozens of games, immortalizing the lawyer who saved their empire.

Who Owns King Kong Today?

Today, King Kong's rights are scattered across Hollywood:

Universal Studios operates King Kong theme park attractions with rights obtained from Richard Cooper.

Cooper's heirs retain certain publishing rights for King Kong books and comics.

Warner Bros, through corporate acquisitions, controls the original RKO film rights.

What exactly Universal bought remains sealed in contracts.

The great irony? A character born from one man's vision has become a fractured legal entity. King Kong's copyright has been torn apart and distributed across Hollywood—as if the great ape himself had grabbed it in both hands and ripped it to pieces in his final rage.

What started as a Dutch officer stumbling upon a real monster in an Indonesian jungle became one of cinema's most enduring myths—and copyright law's most magnificent mess.